Joanna Kirk

Joanna Kirk’s pastel paintings relate her experience of motherhood in which beauty is marked out against everyday reality to provide a new perspective on her work and life. Using her fingers to blend colours and build surface, much of Kirk’s inspiration is drawn from the Impressionist painters Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt for whom domesticity was their given sphere, as well as later artists such as Louise Bourgeois for her ongoing revision of childhood experience.

Kirk's new work takes this theme to a more extreme level. The children are now immersed in the landscape more than ever before, 'lost' or 'devoured' by the chaos and scrupulousness of nature. These much larger pieces challenge the eye with their deliberately detailed surfaces.